Hacking the Academy: The Ebook Volume

On September 8, the DigitalCultureBooks imprint of the University of Michigan Library and University Michigan Press released the online edition of Hacking the Academy. Conceived of by Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt at GMU’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, Hacking the Academy is an experiment in publishing. It’s a crowdsourced book, in which contributors had merely one week (May 21-28, 2010) to come up with and submit material. It’s also heavily edited, with Dan and Tom shaping the mass—the mess?—of possible submissions into a cohesive, coherent work. Authors include professors, graduate students, journalists, archivists, and alternate academic career visionaries. (Full disclosure: I’m in there too.)

As Jason Jones notes on ProfHacker, the book has been coming out in stages. From the first, a unedited, raw collection of all the submissions was aggregated at Hacking the Academy. Now, the edited online volume has been released. In 2012, a print edition will be available as well.

Because the book is being published under a Creative Commons non-commercial license, anybody is free to share or remix the work, as long the original authors and editors are properly attributed. This license is another way the book is an experiment—a major academic publisher is giving free license to anyone to shape, circulate, or reimagine the book.

Here, then, is my initial contribution to the Hacking the Academy ecology: I’ve compiled and formatted the online edited volume into ebook form, suitable for reading on Kindles, Nooks, iPads, and so on. (Hat tip to my colleague Mills Kelly for giving me the idea.)